Can Obama defy the second-term curse?

Second terms — like second mortgages, second marriages and second trips to the salad bar — are seldom as gratifying as the first time around.

The conventional wisdom, derived from four decades of second terms that have ranged from moderately crummy (Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan) to catastrophic (Richard Nixon, George W. Bush), is that President Barack Obama can expect his power to ebb with each passing day until he finds himself like Bill Clinton, riding around the marble halls in the White House on a bicycle with a 60-plus percent approval rating.

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Obama’s official 2013 swearing-in

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The reality isn’t quite as comical — Clinton’s spin was a joke filmed for a banquet audience, and he was dealing with any number of heavy foreign policy challenges during the sunset phase of his tenure. But presidential closing acts tend to be periods of reaction rather than action. Even the strongest and most proactive chief executives find themselves bowing to events, a process not unlike watching the battery of an iPhone slowly die — with many messages still left to be returned.

Obama, who has made a habit of bucking historic trends, is hoping to defy the second-term curse. He’ll try to transform his campaign organization, with its millions-strong lists of supporters, into a new force for fundraising and mobilization to pressure Republicans and Democrats who don’t support his agenda.

“We may have started this as a long shot presidential primary campaign in 2007, but it’s always been about more than just winning an election,” Obama said in an email announcing the newly formed Organizing for Action run by his 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina.

The re-branded OFA, he added, “will be a permanent commitment to this mission."

The problem is that there’s nothing quite so impermanent as presidential power in a second term. With that in mind, here are four pitfalls Obama and his team hope to avoid after he takes his hand off the Bible on Monday.

1. An out-of-sync presidency

Obama’s convincing win over Mitt Romney in November has proven to be a powerful lever in his negotiations with Republicans so far, contributing to his success in fiscal cliff negotiations and helping to drive his approval numbers into the mid-50s for the first time in years. People close to the president cite the 2012 win as a liberating event, one that freed him to stand tough against his enemies. The problem — and it grows with each passing day leading up to the next election — is that Obama’s damn-the-torpedoes attitude is out of sync with the mind-set of his own party. Twenty Senate Democrats face reelection in 2014, compared with 13 Republicans, many of those Democrats in hard-to-hold states like North Carolina, West Virginia, Louisiana and Arkansas. “He’s never been really that attuned to the Hill in the first place,” says a former Obama aide. “Now that he’s not running for anything, he’s increasingly out of sync. That increases the likelihood he leads and no one follows.”